The Ice Cream Man drove slowly along Constitution Street, the strains of Greensleeves trailing discordantly in his wake. It was two in the morning and raining hard, but the Ice Cream Man had no need of such irrelevancies as lights or window-wipers. Truth to tell they disturbed his concentration and that was Bad For Business.

A muffled sob from the back of the van told him that they weren’t all dead yet. Never mind, they’d soon wish they were. The hunger was on him tonight, an appetite that was getting harder to satisfy by the day. Sometimes he wasn’t sure he wanted to keep up the effort. In those darker moods that seemed to take him more and more these days, he felt he could burn the world down and laugh as the flames came to claim him too.

But not tonight.

A police squad car passed by, the occupants blind and deaf to the ice cream van’s siren song; unlike the unfortunate specimens he’d caught and stacked in the back. Of course they had passed: only prey heard his call and having heard became his. It was too easy really and the boredom made him cruel. Take last night…

He smiled to himself and began to whistle tunelessly, the world beyond the windscreen, a smeared blur of light and shadow.

But the minute she woke and came to the window, face a pale oval, smooth and perfect as an egg, he knew. As he always did.

“Come on down Cathy,” he intoned solemnly through the loudspeaker. “I’ve got your favourite. Just pop some slippers on sweetheart. You don’t need money so you won’t need to disturb your dear old mammy. I’ve got a special surprise for you in the back. Best get it while it’s cold though.”

I dreamt I was flying high above a white mountain at night. As I swooped closer I made out the glint of bone on the moonlit slopes and with that realisation I began to plummet downwards. Something big and winged was trying to catch me with its claws but my descent was too rapid. Just before I hit the broke-bone mountain, I was jerked awake by the sound of a frantic pounding on the door.

“Rose. Let me in,” shouted Rufus. “Rose! Quick!” The last word degenerated into a long drawn out shriek.

Swinging my legs wearily over the side of the bed, I shuffled like the crone I’d become to the door, pausing as I reached it. A ferocious growling and the sound of splintering wood didn’t lift my torpor. Damn Vic was good. But what the hell-

“Rose!” Somewhere out in the dark, something snarled. Given it hadn’t already attacked, I decided that whatever was stalking us wasn’t in a hurry.

“Oh Jesus,” Rufus moaned.

“Reports of Jesus’ caring side have been greatly exaggerated,” I said, flicking on the overhead light, unbolting the door and dragging Rufus inside before he had time to reply. He’d been facing the thing on the landing and fell backwards onto the floor, legs blocking the opening. Outside, something moved, a scrape of claw, a flash of fang and neon yellow eye. The beast snarled again, softly this time, confident perhaps that its supper snack wasn’t going anywhere.

“Pull your legs up,” I whispered to Rufus who didn’t respond.

Maybe he couldn’t. The tricking growl was making my hackles rise, Christ alone knew what it was doing to him. I was going to have to haul him out the way by which point the monster in the hall would have torn both our throats out. A taut silence followed by the scrape of claws, the beast was gathering itself for a final lunge. My sensitive eyes picked out the wooden remnants of the door from the neighbouring room.

Just as I was about to grab Rufus’ shoulders to pull him out the way he raised his legs and kicked it shut. I ran forward to bolt it just as the creature crashed against it, roaring with rage. A splintering sound and the top hinge looked like it was just about to fall out. My fingers, numb with whatever Vic had worked, fumbled with the bolt and a wave of dizziness threatened to evolve into a fully fledged black-out.

The door was just about to give way for good, but there was only silence beyond it. Had the thing left? I was distracted by a loud banshee screech of only to discover it was Rufus dragging a squat chest of drawers towards me evidently intent on barricading the door.

Esther may have looked like your kindly neighbourhood grand-mother but she was the high priestess of a feared fringe cult and no one in their wrong mind, never mind their right, crossed her.

On the plus side, you always knew where you were with Esther. Tyson must indeed have been new. I never knew why she stooped to working in the club as their security, but then she most likely had reasons of her own. She always did. She probably didn’t get my problem with Lionel Ritchie so we were even.

“Rose,” she called after me as I walked down the corridor to the bar.

I turned.

“After tonight please don’t come here again. It wouldn’t be…wise.”

She stared after me as I walked down the stairs, the force of which I could feel as if it were a gun pressed into the middle of my back. It didn’t bode well that the boss was willing for me to come in tonight but that after that I was effectively barred.

The landing below boasted a massive oak door with a neon green snake above it, its tongue flickering in and out as the light changed. It looked overdone, ludicrous a clumsy half-assed attempt to depict a door-way to another world. Typical of satan-botherers, but different from how I remembered the place. Back then, the worst excesses of some of the clientele had been tempered presumably to widen the appeal of the club.

I took the last steps down to the landing pausing beneath the snake. The tackiness I could just about take, but something else was wrong about that door-way. I paused, staring at the frame surrounding the door. There appeared to be a coagulated darkness hanging in moving clumps around it as though it was alive with a dull hen-sick green just visible somewhere at its core. I hadn’t seen so many elementals cluster around a mere door before. They were the bacteria of the supernatural world, lying in wait for live prey to attach themselves to and infect. There was life in the club all right, but judging by the bouncer, most of it wasn’t sentient.

As though to confirm that thought, something fell from the door-jamb creating an inky pool visible even on the already dark tiled floor. But that wasn’t what bothered me. I took my glasses off to get a better view and quickly wished I hadn’t. The tell-tale phosphorescent crimson and orange of violent death lit the place up like a fun-fair; so bright I had to quickly put my glasses back in place.

I called the Deadlights and they circled me in lazy loops of white and blue lights. I took my first steps through the door and I heard a sizzle and the screech of something exiting life as it dropped from above onto them. At least I wouldn’t have a little passenger riding me for the rest of the night. But that was where the positives ended. I walked into a vast room with a high-vaulted ceiling covered in sigils of unknown origin. Pretentious, moi?

A vast mirror ball turned slowly sending light shards to the far flung corners of the room and swallowed by the light from the equally vast curved bar that dominated the far wall. It was empty but there were hidden rooms branching off from the main one, where people could talk or get up to less innocent activities. Not that there was any music playing, nor anyone to hear it judging by the empty tables around the circular dance-floor. The DJ had obviously not arrived yet. When I used to come here it was a guy called Dave who had failed to come to terms with the sad fact that he was never going to be the next Aleister Crowley. He liked German death-metal leavened, strangely enough by the odd Lionel Ritchie and Chris de Burgh tracks thrown in for the sheer hell of it. And hell it most certainly was….

Martin didn’t mind that he was dead so much as the fact that he’d been killed by his unloving wife of twenty-three years. To add insult to injury the bitch was now living the high life in what had been their suburban semi in Fairmilehead on the outskirts of Edinburgh.

She had laced his dinner with arsenic night after night for weeks and smiled at him over the dinner table as he’d eaten every last poisoned mouthful. She’d tended him devotedly as he’d vomited his guts up and held his hand when the pain got so bad he’d begged her to put a pillow over his face to release him from the agony. Eventually she had relented and, picking up one of the over-stuffed pillows she liked so much, had lowered it gently onto his face with a little quirk of her mouth he didn’t recall having ever seen before.

He had tried not to fight of course, but found that his wasted body’s instinct to survive thought differently. He began to struggle, to signal to her that he’d changed his mind, that she didn’t have to carry out her grisly promise after all. But she only bore down harder with a strength he hadn’t known she had in her. The last sound he heard before he died was his wife’s voice:

“I hope you go to hell you fat bastard. It’s more than you deserve after what you’ve done.”

That was strange he’d thought, because he hadn’t been fat at the end. On the contrary the weeks and months of illness had rendered him skeletal, skin hanging in folds around a wasted frame as though he was wearing a flesh suit that was far too big.

Well, she had got her wish. Except he didn’t think he was in hell. No, it looked very much like he was still here in the home sweet home they’d shared together for over two decades. He had tried to leave, but found he couldn’t get further than the gate at the end of the garden. This was unfortunate as he subsequently discovered that he had also fallen victim to the oldest cliché in the book: she had been having an affaire with his so-called best friend Cliff Morgan, the man he’d played golf with at the Swanston Golf Club twice a month for almost as long as he’d been married to Mary.

Well, as he had been fond of saying when he was alive, this was indeed a pretty pickle. The first time Cliff had come round, he’d tried to get through to him, screaming himself hoarse to make his friend understand what Mary had done. It was only when Cliff put one hand on Mary’s breast, while unbuttoning his trousers with the other that he realised the full horror of his predicament. What was he to do?

What, he wondered, had Mary had meant when she’d referred to something he’d done. He couldn’t for the life or even death of him fathom that one out. He also wasn’t sure what had upset him the most: Mary’s betrayal or Cliff’s. To his surprise, on balance it was his friend’s behaviour that had disturbed him the most. She had killed him to be sure and he wasn’t about to forget that; but strangely it was Cliff’s defection that had cut him to the quick. He hoped fervently that didn’t mean he was some sort of homo. No, that wouldn’t do at all.

Tonight the traitorous love-birds were having a romantic dinner for two: scented candles, roses, and the big dining table set as though it was a fancy restaurant. She of course was done up like a dog’s dinner in a pink evening dress that was far too tight and revealing in all the wrong places for her frumpy body. He had done that hideous Bobbie Charlton comb-over that Colin and Mary had used to laugh about behind his back. Well, she wasn’t laughing now, the two-faced cow, as she slid her stocking-clad foot up and down Cliff’s pinstriped leg and gazed adoringly into his eyes.

Maybe this was hell. Doomed to imprisonment in his own house watching his killer and his best friend canoodle with not a thing he could do about it.

Or at least that’s what he’d thought. Just the other day (although time was fluid in this state so he couldn’t really be sure) he’d met another occupant of the house that could see, hear and understand him perfectly. She said she’d died in the house when she was young and she certainly didn’t look older than sixteen. She told him she used to watch over him when he’d been alive to which he retorted that she had obviously not done a very good job given recent events. She huffed for a few hours and only came round after he’d apologised profusely. Some assiduous flattery and ego massaging later (of which he was rather proud of given he’d never had to do it before), she revealed that yes, there was a way to intervene in the physical world after all. It was tricky and dangerous, even for ghosts such as they, but it could be done.

It would be done, he thought grimly. If it was the last thing he ever did, it would be done. After he’d learned how, the why and when would look after themselves.

The Cowgate was in Edinburgh’s Old Town, hidden beneath the South and George IV Bridges like the monstrous child of shamed parents too polite to smother it at birth. It was dark no matter what time of day or year because of the looming tenements on either side, built higher than either sense or sanity dictated. Of course clubs like the Snake-Pit thrived like mushrooms in the grime and lack of light and ‘low-life’ became an elevated state to which the clubbers could only aspire. And I should know. My lack of ambition and taste for irredeemable scum were legendary in this part of town.

It was ten o’clock and still early by satanic orgiast standards, but I was desperate for a drink. I pulled my borrowed clothes around me like a second, ill-fitting skin, heading down the alleyway and toward the nondescript door in what looked like an abandoned tenement.

I knocked on the door and was met with only silence. I tried again, harder with the same response. I drew my fist back preparing for a good old fashioned hammering, but the door swung open and a young, Hispanic looking man appeared in the door-way, the faint boom of a base and drum combo going on from what seemed like miles underground.

“Yes?” said the man, the sibilance of the s sounding loud in the narrow alley. He had a hair net over dark hair and was wearing what appeared to be an all in one lime body-suit.

At least I wasn’t the only one that was sartorially challenged tonight.

“Can I come in?”

“Hmm. Let me think about that,” he said folding his arms pretending to be deep in thought. “No.”

“I’m a regular. Or used to be. I-”

“I know who you are, bitch. Why else do you think you’re barred? I heard all about the fight you started on the dance-floor. Five people injured and one airlifted to hospital.”

“I know, talk about murder on the dance-floor eh? But you know, joking aside there are two types of people in the world: those that like Lionel Ritchie and-”

“Stop,” he said lip curling, “before my sides split.”

“Don’t be like that. I would have thought any bloke brave enough to go out dressed as Catwoman had to have a sense of humour.”

“See how funny you think it is when I rip off your head and piss down the hole. Beat it – I ain’t gonna tell you again.”

Ah bouncers and dress codes, a marriage made in hell by the most sadistic of devils. The door began to close and I wedged the toe of my boot over the threshold.

“We’ve obviously got off on the wrong foot,” I reasoned.

“And I’m about to take yours off if you don’t remove it.”

“Tyson?” A familiar contralto voice floated from somewhere deep in the bowels of the club.

We were in a small freezing room, devoid of furniture apart from a gurney that looked like a relic from a haunted asylum horror flick. Undaunted, Vic had been pummelling my bruised flesh and stretching my bones with such a sustained ferocity that I was at points wishing that I really was dead.

“You’ll feel better in the morning,” was all he would say. I was lying under a thin cover stark naked. It was freezing and my teeth would have been chattering were it not for the biting cold.

“My mother always told me to live in the present,” I moaned.

“You never knew your mother and I’m beginning to doubt you ever even had one. Oh, by the way, keep your door locked, you and the blond geezer, what’s his name? Rudy isn’t it? Especially him.”

“What about all that owe you stuff Vic, are you planning to off us tonight in an all singing all dancing show of just how grateful you are?”

“Rose, haven’t you noticed what tonight is?”

“Go on, amaze me.” I winced as he dug his fingers deep into the meat of my shoulders.

“Lock the fucking door, okay? That’s all I’m saying.”

I pondered this with a sinking of spirits that I thought had already flat-lined.

“What if it doesn’t hold,” I said eventually.

“Well that would be an end to all your problems wouldn’t it? Now hold still.”

I felt the slow trickle of something warm across my back and didn’t bother asking him what it was. A low rumbling sound filled the room until a heavy weight fell across me muffling my hearing but it didn’t matter because I could feel it, like a cat’s purr but the effect was chilling. A warm lassitude spread through my limbs as though I had been injected with something. A little voice at the back of my mind was shouting something about danger, but I paid no attention and willingly embraced oblivion. My body had sustained some serious damage and I was at the end of my strength. I had to trust that Vic would help me and with that thought I blacked out.

Edinburgh’s birth and the land upon which it was built was nothing more than a volcanic plug spewed out of the belly of a bilious god; destined to become a precarious high point where people felt safe from invasion, but unfortunately were not. They built a wall, a stone girdle as though that would protect them from what was within. And when the girdle became too tight, they built up and up giving the world its first plague ridden high rises. But that of course was so Old Town darling, and the New was supposed to be the antidote to all that nasty disease and poverty. And maybe it was, but it was also sterile, without the bloated, infarcted beauty of the old where most of the supernaturals made their home.

But there was a newer, tougher breed of supernatural that had no need of such sentimental aesthetics and I was going to its lair. As I turned left into Dean Terrace past the carefully preserved des res from another era, I tried to focus on the non-existent plan which appeared to be: rooting around in the monster’s lair while it was absent hoping to find The Mask which of course would just be lying at the end of a trial of arrows along with some clues about the identity of two murderers who may or may not have known its owner twenty odd years ago.

Walking along Ann Street I wondered how a flying lizard centuries old had managed to infest one of its mansions. Number 28 was next, the lights were not on but that did not mean no one was home. I walked up the short rubbish strewn, weed filled path and rang the bell which I could hear clanging around the house. No one came. On impulse I pushed at the door and it opened. It wasn’t really that surprising that she didn’t think to lock the door, it wasn’t as though she needed to be security conscious and if random council workers or posties went missing more plausible explanations could be found, palms greased, influence exercised. The beauty of this type of predator was that it lay in wait amongst its prey perfectly camouflaged until it was too late. In the more exclusive areas of the city where ‘neighbour’ was a dirty word, they were practically invisible.

And even if you saw past the beguiling disguise, if you dared to try telling the police that the little old lady next door was a vampire, you’d be buying your own personal one-way ticket to the nut-house…

At first I thought the pounding was an alcohol based manifestation caused by all the Talisker I’d sucked on down before I finally got to bed last night, but it turned out to be someone at the door. A very determined someone judging by the damn good thrashing that was being administered. I sighed and buried my head under the pillow burrowing down into drunken oblivion where I belonged. It was only when the shouting started, punctuated by vicious kicks to the door that I knew the chances of it being a new meter man or untrained neighbour were positively anorexic.

I uncovered my head and was rewarded by a man’s voice shouting heated but still quite inventive abuse at top volume. Beginning to warm up myself, I pulled the curtains on my four poster, leapt out of bed, managing to pull on dressing gown, blade from the dresser and my dark glasses, all before I reached the door.

Good sense and hangover reasserted themselves and so I paused palm on the painted wood and looked through the spy-hole. There were two of them: he was tall and thin, she short and plump and apparently trying to placate him, gaze darting around the stairwell nervously. The Fox twins: he Rufus her Ruby. Now this was beginning to seriously tick me off. These guys were part of the so-called psychic community within which I was persona non grata all on account of my little penchant for search and destroy missions. Most of the community was made up of losers, morons and no-talent, superstitious weirdos. Apart from these two who together formed the Fox Agency performing discreet services to the supernaturally challenged. She was an exceptionally powerful clairvoyant and he was one of the best exorcists that I’d ever had the misfortune to come across. I say misfortune because some of the demons he’d cast out had come calling for me and were only persuaded to leave after much blood and not a few body parts, thankfully none of them mine. But that was a whole other story.

“She’s obviously not in,” I heard Ruby say.

“Of course she is, it’s not like she’s got anywhere else to go. She wasn’t out on a hunt last night, so there’s no reason she can’t answer the flaming door.” her brother told her.

“Well at least that’s something,” she said looking pained, “but how do you know?”

Yes, how the hell did he know?

“Never mind that. Psychotic bitches like that don’t have friends and they don’t have anywhere to go when they’re not out making the world a worse place. Stands to reason they’ll be tucked up in their kip-”

I had heard enough and wrenched the door open.

“Well psycho-bitch is up now and you’ll both be familiar with the old saying, beware your heart’s desire? Good, because I’ve got high hopes you’re going to get it,” I said.

Two surprised faces whipped round. She was about five feet and everything about her was round and compact including her lips which were tightly compressed in a clearly heroic effort not to cry. She was wearing a duffle-coat and clutching a small back-pack for dear life. He was about six four; broad of shoulder but no real meat on him yet to pad the frame out. They didn’t really look anything alike apart from the fair hair and the same expressive hazel eyes.

“Yes?,” said Rufus staring at me, uncertainty evicting rage in the click of a door opening: “Can I help you?”

I came to tied to a chair in an empty, carpet-less room. It smelled of dust underlaid with a coppery hint of old blood and the only light came from the streetlight outside. Viciously tight bindings bit into raw flesh that felt as if someone had tried to flay it from my body while I’d been out.

I was alone.

Seconds pounded past on little leaden feet but frankly I was glad for even that meagre attention because it proved I was still alive. And then, a slight sound so faint it was almost imperceptible accompanied by a cool breeze across ravaged skin made me look up.

The demon covered the ceiling and still there was not enough room for him to spread his wings to their full extent. He didn’t hover so much as hang, neck bent at an impossible angle, lustrous black hair concealing his face. Only the gold of his eyes shone out through the hair, so bright they generated light that now played around the room: clearly the source of what I had fondly imagined had come from outside.

He must have heard some sound, perhaps the dilation of arteries, or the frantic pumping of blood by an agitated heart because he snarled, a low, rumbling growl that froze what was left of my blood.

Time stopped, my aches and pains fled, evicted by the certain knowledge that this was how it was going to end; here in this dirty little room at the hands of a creature so vile, even its own kind shunned it. Then with a deafening roar, a torrent of dark water surged into the room from the walls, the ceiling and from beneath the floor, slapping wetly about the legs of the chair. In seconds it was knee high and I realised it wasn’t water because in its discoloured brackish depths, solid shapes swam.

“Are you going to kill me Lukastor?”

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Who am I?

Well that's a good question and on bad days I'm not sure I know the answer.

My name though is Rose Garnett and I hunt down among the dead men in Edinburgh's necropolis. These story fragments are jagged little pills from my own personal stash; free, gratis and for nothing. For those of a more delicate disposition, there's always the Dead Central Soundtrack to help the medicine go down.

And to the select few wise enough to know nothing is for free, these little peep holes will reveal what's really waiting on the other side. Who knows, if you're very unlucky it may even be me...